Krishna & RahulFounders of Finvestor Published On: Saturday, January 30, 2016 Views 2092

We are a marketplace for financial advisers. We offer two products for financial advice for customers:

One interaction with advisers for financial queries, which has free and paid. Fee the only advisory is as mandated by SEBI and provided only by Registered Investment Advisers (RIAs). Here a customer pays fees to the financial adviser so that unbiased/commission-free advice can be delivered. The advisers do not sell products but provide detailed insight into the financial journey of a customer.

Second service, currently free is the robo-advisory, which gives instant answers to questions posted by a customer. We are more into the personal financial advisory space and not the daily equity calls, trading calls space (though we have advisers listed who provide such services)

finvestor.in aims to provide unbiased financial advice via SEBI Registered Investment Advisers and via automated Robo-Advisory. This will be as against the current practice of misselling of financial products by agents.

I have been a victim of commission motivated selling of financial products (ULIPs in the mid-2000s) and I have seen many of my friends and relative fall victim to financial products that do not provide any benefit to the customer.

Life is short, live it full.

We sell a service – financial advice – selling a service versus selling commodity products online is the biggest challenge. A commodity product, such as T-Shirts, Table etc, is easier for the customer to understand, whereas when it comes to the fee-only financial advisory, people are unsure of what they would expect to get. To prove the value proposition for the customer takes time. A service also cannot be discounted as in as of a commodity product.

We are in a new area of the fee-only advisory. This concept exists in the developed nations, but it is new in India. We are also introducing Robo-Advisory using new age technology. When it comes to financial advisory, investors have been cheated and often avoid talking to an RIA assuming that the RIA to be yet another commission-agent and that it does not make sense to pay and get cheated. We are building social media blogs, offline training sessions to educate a small, yet, early adopters of people who we believe can spread the cause of fee-only advisory. We also have brought in the robo-advisory for free to encourage people to learn more about personal finance. We are seeing traction in the free advisory space and we are confident that people will shift to the fee-only advisory soon.

We are bootstrapped.

We are a lean startup. We employ people on contractual terms. The IT development was executed via a freelancer; several market research was done by connecting with IIM Rohtak. Social media marketing was also outsourced.

Humour – Helps you conquer anything.

Ethics – Helps you to be known for the right cause

Passionate -Unless you are passionate about something, you don’t get results

We are using Microsoft Azure and pretty happy with them

Working as per my body clock – rise early and sleep early.

Improving which task is more important than the other.

• One tip to success:

Work hard towards what you want.

• One mistake you believe every individual must avoid:

Not thinking about a Plan B

• One most important lesson that you have learnt till now:

If you don’t believe in yourself, nobody will.

Working towards creating unbiased financial advisory and enabling wealth creation for all; Traveling the country and world and explore places

I never regret any decision I take, all decisions have been either well thought or due to situations that I had no control over. My suggestion would be never to look back, but understand the best opportunities that today may provide.

Mountains, Beaches and countryside – essentially anything that connects me with nature.

“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.” —Les Brown